As related by Simmons the English passion for the Bedouin, the desert Arab, is well exemplified in these stories of eccentric, obsessed, undaunted travelers extending from Hester Stanhope, Queen of the Arabs, in 1810 to T. E. Lawrence in 1918.

Sir Richard Francis Burton

Among those who regarded the Bedouin as knight-errants who practiced the wildest form of chivalry were Richard Burton, who disguised himself as a dervish doctor to make the pilgrimage to Mecca; Jane Digby, female counterpart of the Byronic hero, a proud, passionate, moody, often anguished sinner; country gentleman, poet, sportsman, insatiable womanizer Wilfrid Blunt and his wife Anne, a consummate horsewoman, linguist and Byron’s granddaughter; Charles Doughty, a cross between a medieval itinerant scholar and a 1960s-style hippie wanderer.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Simmons describes the Arabian horse, the building of the Suez Canal, Napoleon’s temporary conquest of Egypt in 1798 and the Lebanese civil wars of 1840-1860, which precipitated today’s ongoing agony.